Hisstory

For a quarter of a century, a zealous band of liberals and pseudo-liberals has attempted to transform the Alger Hiss espionage case into a rerun of the Dreyfus affair. The books seeking to vindicate Hiss have advanced various bizarre hypotheses, but have failed to shake the veridicality of Whittaker Chambers’ testimony. The sole advantage John Chabot Smith’s work has over its predecessors is its appearance at a time when the harrying of Richard Nixon and the assault on the CIA and the FBI made the success of this dubious venture seem possible.

Unfortunately for Smith, Professor Allen Weinstein of Smith College had previously taken successful legal action to force the FBI to release 15,000 pages of material on the case. In an article-length treatment of Smith’s theories in The New York Review of Books, Weinstein demolished his central forgery-by-typewriter hypothesis-but I shall not go into the intricacies of that matter here.

NW

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Nathaniel Weyl

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

For a quarter of a century, a zealous band of liberals and pseudo-liberals has attempted to transform the Alger Hiss espionage case into a rerun of the Dreyfus affair. The books seeking to vindicate Hiss have advanced various bizarre hypotheses, but have failed to shake the veridicality of Whittaker Chambers’ testimony. The sole advantage John Chabot Smith’s work has over its predecessors is its appearance at a time when the harrying of Richard Nixon and the assault on the CIA and the FBI made the success of this dubious venture seem possible.

Unfortunately for Smith, Professor Allen Weinstein of Smith College had previously taken successful legal action to force the FBI to release 15,000 pages of material on the case. In an article-length treatment of Smith’s theories in The New York Review of Books, Weinstein demolished his central forgery-by-typewriter hypothesis-but I shall not go into the intricacies of that matter here.